seeks the original choice, which it aims to capture in a self-evident
intuition” (BN 571 ). It is the subject’s immediate grasp of this evidence
that existential psychoanalysis considers decisive.
Looking toward the future, Sartre avows that this psychoanalysis has
yet to find its Freud. “At most we can find the foreshadowing of it in
certain particularly successful biographies. We hope to be able to attempt
elsewhere two examples in relation to Flaubert and Dostoevsky. But it
matters little to us whether it now exists,” he assures us, “the important
thing is that it is possible” (BN 575 ).
The two remaining sections of this chapter expand on the basic
principles of psychoanalysis which the phenomenological ontology of
the book established. Sartre reduces the three major categories of con-
crete existence that entitled partiv, namely, being doing and having, to
two –beingandhaving– because he considers “doing” purely transi-
tional. Thus knowing is a form of appropriation, that is, having. But
he reserves a special place for “playing” that we encountered in his
War Diaries, for development at length in his posthumously published
Notebooks for an Ethics. It seems opposed to the “spirit of seriousness,”
which is a form of bad faith. In fact, he likens play to Kierkegaardian
irony in that it “releases subjectivity.” It is the one type of activity that
Sartre admits is entirely gratuitous; it seems that the free agent is his own
principle. Rather than concern withpossessinga being in the world, “his
goal, which he aims at through sports or pantomime or games, is to attain
himself as a certain being, precisely the being which is in question in
his being” (BN 580 – 581 ). In effect, the function of this kind of act is
“to make manifest and to present toitselfthe absolute freedom which is
the very being of the person.” As Sartre admits, “this particular type
of project, which has freedom for its foundation and its goal, deserves a
special study,” which he associates with theEthicsthat he has promised
(BN 583 ). Suggestive of that ethical position is the fact that Sartre likens
the act of play to that of art; both acts figure in the “notebooks” where he
sketches the thoughts for what came to be known as his “first” ethics.
Like Heidegger, Sartre has his “existential categories” – manners of
distinguishing and relating experiences of different kinds. He concludes
the fourth part of his study with a discussion of quality as a revelation of
being. Gaston Bachelard had performed what he calls a “psychoanalysis”
of the classical elements, namely, air, earth, fire and water. Sartre respects
the insights that Bachelard provided, but thinks that he had not pursued
“Partiv: Having, Doing and Being” 223